/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19859556]

The principal complaint that Fr. Hogg refers to–that the West insists that there is no distinction between God’s essence and his energies–relies on an equivocation. The equivocation involves the usage of the term “distinction.” Fr. Hogg quotes from Aquinas in support of his claim that the West draws no distinction between God’s essence and his energies: “God is all the things that He has…” (On Spiritual Creatures article 11). Aquinas here uses what some metaphysicians call the language of Izzing and Having to mark the distinction between an essence and a property: what God is is his essence, what God has are his properties. Thus, if God is all the things that he has, his properties are identical to his essence, and the Eastern complaint would appear to be warranted. The equivocation here is this. If by “distinguishing” one thing, p, from another thing, q, we claim that p and q are ontologically distinct from one another, and that p can exist without q and q can exist without p, then there is one sense in which God is not all the things that he has, but there is another sense in which he is all the things that he has. Suppose we say, for example, with the Johannine corpus, that God is love, and with the Matthean tradition that God is mercy. Since love and mercy are not identical to each other, it would seem that God is not identical to himself, which seems absurd. But clearly what is intended here is that love is one of God’s properties and mercy is another, and the two properties are not the same property. Hence, on one way of understanding “distinguish”, we see that it is not true that God is all that he has: it is not the case that God is identical to love or identical to mercy. However, we do not want to say that it is possible for God not to be love or for God not to be mercy, since both claims would be heretical. And yet if “to be love” and “to be mercy” are energies that are not essential to God, then necessarily God can either have them or not have them. But this is impossible. Hence these properties are not accidental to God, they are essential. The same analysis would hold for all of the properties (energies) of God: none of them is accidental. In short, for any property, p, that is a property of God, p is included in God’s essence, and God’s essence just is the conjunction of all properties that God has. In this sense, God is all that he has, just so long as the emphasis is on the word “all”: God is not love, and God is not mercy, but he is “love+mercy+…+”. This (presumably very long) conjunctive property is similar to the disjunctive property I discussed above: although it is analyzable in terms of items that, in human beings at least, are separate, accidental properties, there is nothing other than God that has the whole conjunction of pure actualities as an essence, hence this conjunctive property is unique to God and is God’s essence.